[silver_sun]

Google has a library of millions of scanned books from their Google Books project that started in 2004. I think we have reason to believe that there are more than a few books about effectively playing different traditional card games in there, and that an LLM trained with that dataset could generalize to understand how to play Balatro from a text description.

Nonetheless I still think it's impressive that we have LLMs that can just do this now.

[mjamesaustin]

Winning in Balatro has very little to do with understanding how to play traditional poker. Yes, you do need a basic knowledge of different types of poker hands, but the strategy for succeeding in the game is almost entirely unrelated to poker strategy.

[gilrain]

If it tried to play Balatro using knowledge of, e.g., poker, it would lose badly rather than win. Have you played?

[gcr]

I think I weakly disagree. Poker players have intuitive sense of the statistics of various hand types showing up, for instance, and that can be a useful clue as to which build types are promising.